Abstract
The landscape of free will debate was simpler in the 1960s when I first began dealing with the problem of free will. The unstated assumption was that if you had scientific leanings, you would naturally be a compatibilist about free will (believing it to be compatible with determinism). By contrast, if you defended a libertarian or incompatibilist free will, requiring indeterminism, you must inevitably reduce free will to mere chance or to the mystery of uncaused causes, immaterial minds, noumenal selves, or prime movers unmoved. The question I set for myself back then was how one might reconcile a traditional incompatibilist free will requiring indeterminism with modern science without reducing it to either chance or mystery. It has turned out that doing so required rethinking many facets of the traditional problem of free will from the ground up. I report on some results of this rethinking in this paper.
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 7 in this book (Heisenberg 2013).
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We have to make further assumptions about the case to rule out some of these conditions. For example, we have to assume, no one is holding a gun to the woman's head forcing her to go back, or that she is not paralyzed, etc. But the point is that the satisfaction of these further conditions is consistent with the case of the woman as we have imagined it. If these other conditions are satisfied, as they can be, and the business woman's case is in other respects as I have described it, We have an SFA. I offer the complete argument for this in Kane 1996, Chap. 8, among other works listed in Note 2.
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Another related objection that is commonly made at this point is that it is irrational to make efforts to do incompatible things. I concede that in most ordinary situations it is. But I argue that there can be special circumstances in the deliberative lives of rational agents in which it is not irrational to make competing efforts: These include circumstances in which (i) we are deliberating between competing options; (ii) we intend to choose one or the other, but cannot choose both; (iii) we have powerful motives for wanting to choose each of the options for different and incommensurable reasons; (iv) there is a consequent resistance in our will to either choice, so that (v) if either choice is to have a chance of being made, effort will have to be made to overcome the temptation to make the other choice; and most importantly, (vi) we want to give each choice a fighting chance of being made because the motives for each choice are important to us; and we would taking them lightly if we did not make an effort in their behalf. These conditions are the conditions of SFAs.
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If one were to take a religious perspective, this fact might be related to the problem of evil. Compare Evodius’s question to St. Augustine, in Augustine's classic work on free will (Augustine 1964), of why God gave us free will since it brings so much conflict, struggle and suffering into the world.
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Kane, R. (2013). Can a Traditional Libertarian or Incompatibilist Free Will Be Reconciled with Modern Science? Steps Toward a Positive Answer. In: Suarez, A., Adams, P. (eds) Is Science Compatible with Free Will?. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5212-6_17
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